Marek Edelman

Early life Details of Marek Edelman's birth are not known for certain; sources give two possible years of birth, either 1919 in Homel (present-day Belarus), or in 1922 in Warsaw. His father, Natan Feliks Edelman (died 1924), was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (his father's brothers, also Socialist Revolutionaries, were executed by the Bolsheviks). When Edelman's mother Cecylia died, he was 14 years old, and was looked after by other staff members at the hospital where she had worked in Warsaw, the city he always called home. He said in 2001: "Warsaw is my city. It is here that I learned Polish, Yiddish and German. It is here that at school, I learned one must always take care of others. It is also here that I was slapped in the face just because I was a Jew."

In 1939 he joined and became a leader in Tsukunft (Future), the Bund's youth organization for older children. During the war, he restarted these organizations inside the Warsaw Ghetto.

The defiance and organization of the Bund made their mark on Edelman. As conditions for Jews worsened in the 1930s, Bund members preferred to challenge the mounting antisemitism rather than flee. Edelman later said: "The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine. They believed that Poland was their country, and they fought for a just, socialist Poland in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities' rights would be guaranteed." Over the next three weeks, the fighting was intense. The Jewish fighters killed and wounded scores of Nazis but inevitably sustained far greater losses. On May 8, ŻOB's commander, Mordechaj Anielewicz, was surrounded by German forces. Anielewicz died during the final assault on the ŻOB's bunker on 8 May 1943, which meant that now Edelman was in charge. "After three weeks," he recalled, "most of us were dead." On the morning of May 10, Edelman and his few remaining comrades escaped through the sewers and made their way to the non-Ghetto part of Warsaw to find safety among their Polish compatriots. At this point the Uprising was over and the fate of those fighters who had remained behind is unknown. After the capitulation, Edelman together with a group of other ŻOB fighters, hid out in the ruins of the city as one of the Robinson Crusoes of Warsaw before being rescued and evacuated with the help of the centrist Armia Krajowa (Home Army).

Later life

Edelman's hospital upbringing had proven invaluable in the Warsaw Ghetto. After World War II, he studied at Łódź Medical School and became a noted cardiologist who invented an original life-saving operation. In 1948, Edelman actively opposed the incorporation of the Bund into the Polish United Workers' Party (Poland's Communist party), which led to the Communists disbanding the organization. In 1976, he became an activist with the Workers' Defence Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników) and later with the Solidarity movement.

In an open letter dated February 2, 1983, he wrote of his refusal of invitation:Forty years ago we fought not only for our lives. We fought for life in dignity and freedom. To celebrate our anniversary there where social life is dominated throughout by humiliation and coercion would be to deny our fight.

Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame A couple of days before the official event, on April 17, 1983, several hundred Solidarity members staged a commemoration of their own, gathering spontaneously at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. Edelman was then prevented from being present at this occasion because he was being held under house arrest back in Lodz. Edelman sat in his house surrounded by the police cars, at a table set for a fancy dinner which included empty places because the police were not letting the guests in, except the journalist Hanna Krall.

Edelman was a lifelong anti-Zionist. In a 1985 interview, he said Zionism was a "lost cause" and questioned Israel's viability. He remained firmly Polish, refusing to emigrate to Israel.

In post-Communist Poland, Edelman was a member of several centrist liberal parties: the Citizens' Movement for Democratic Action, Democratic Union, Freedom Union and Democratic Party – demokraci.pl. He supported the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as well as the 2003 Iraq war, both of which he saw as instances of American democracy saving countries from fascism again. On April 17, 1998, Edelman was awarded Poland's highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle.

Edelman lent public support to anti-fascist initiatives and to organizations combatting antisemitism. In 1993, he accompanied a convoy of goods into the city of Sarajevo while that city was under siege. Edelman strongly condemned international indifference during the Bosnian Genocide in the early 1990s, calling it a disgrace for the rest of Europe and "a delayed victory by Hitler – a victory from the grave."

In August 2002, Edelman wrote an open letter to the Palestinian resistance leaders. Although the letter criticised the Palestinian suicide attacks, its tone infuriated the Israeli government and press. According to the late British writer and activist Paul Foot, "He wrote [the letter] in a spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance fighter, as a former leader of a Jewish uprising not dissimilar in desperation to the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories." He addressed his letter "To all the leaders of Palestinian military, paramilitary and guerrilla organizations – To all the soldiers of Palestinian militant groups."

Family life Marek Edelman was married to Alina Margolis-Edelman (1922–2008). They had two children, Aleksander and Anna. Each April he laid flowers in Warsaw for those he had served with in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Polish President Lech Kaczyński and the former President Lech Wałęsa were present at the funeral, attended by about 2,000 persons.

Władysław Bartoszewski, former Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs and an Auschwitz survivor, led the tributes to Edelman, saying: "He reached a good age. He left as a contented man, even if he was always aware of the tragedy he went through." The former Polish Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, was also present and said Edelman had been a role model for him. Ian Kelly, official spokesperson for the United States Department of State, expressed sympathies and affirmed that the United States "stands with Poland as it mourns the loss of a great man."

In popular culture In the 2001 television film Uprising, he was portrayed by American actor John Ales.

The documentary Marek Edelman... And There Was Love in the Ghetto, directed by Andrzej Wajda and Jolanta Dylewska, was released in 2019.